


Zip, Zero, Zilch, Nada

by rosymamacita



Series: Chancellor of Earth [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, The Drop Ship, The butterfly effect, Wells Jaha Lives, Wells is a hero
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-04-23 04:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4863887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosymamacita/pseuds/rosymamacita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zip was the last of The 100. She was a nobody on The Ark and she's a nobody on the ground. The only one who notices her is the one who notices everything. Wells Jaha. </p><p>Wells becomes her friend and she can see that delinquents don't like him. She can see that the path he is going down could only lead to disaster.  She makes the decision to do whatever she can, in her small way, to change what she is afraid is his fate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. #100

**Author's Note:**

> Off I go, making up original characters and calling them nothing.
> 
> Somewhere along the way, I decided my nobody would save Wells.

Third level. That’s where she was. And all the kids had cleared out of the drop ship by the time she even got her seat belt unfastened. It had jammed in the landing. Nobody stayed behind to help her out, all eager to be one of the first humans in a hundred years to step foot, so she was the one hundredth person to touch the ground in one hundred years.

No wait. She saw the dead bodies. She was 98. 

Wait. Scratch that. Bellamy Blake had stowed aboard. Put her back at 99. 

98 kids were running around, laughing and dancing, singing. Generally just being, well, kids. They didn’t pay attention to her. That was okay. This air was so rich, she was getting dizzy.

“Well, fuck,” she said and she sat down right where she was. Under a tree. In the dirt. She felt the dirt under her fingers. So this was dirt. Soil. It was kind of cold and grainy. It smelled a little bit like her shoes, but sweet. 

98 kids ran around the drop ship, and she sat in the dirt. 

“Hey,” someone said.

She looked up to see a handsome brown skinned boy. Holy shit. Wells Jaha was talking to her. She blinked.

“Are you okay? I noticed you were the last one out of the drop ship.”

She blinked again. He noticed her?

“Did you hit your head?”

She had to think about that. Had she? “I—“ she croaked. She coughed and cleared her throat. She didn’t know when the last time she’d spoken to anyone was, either. “I don’t know.” Her words were hoarse.

Wells Jaha took his two hands and put them on her head. Holy. Shit. He started feeling around for a bump or a cut or something.

“I don’t see anything. Can you tell me your name?”

She nodded. “Zip.”

“Sip? Syb?”

“No. Zip. Like Zippo. Zero. Zilch. Nada.”

“I’m Wells. I like your name. It’s zippy.” He smiled at her. Holy. Shit.

She smiled back. “Like I haven’t heard that one before.” Actually she hadn’t. No one had ever teased her about her name before. No one had ever really noticed her enough to do that. And now, here was the Chancellor’s son, teasing her. “Actually,” she said, a little bit dazed by the attention, the oxygen rich air, and the smell of earth rising all around her. “My mother didn’t know what to name me. Dad was floated right before I was born, and when the nurse asked her what to name me, she didn’t know what to say, so she said ‘I got zip.’ And that’s what the nurse wrote on my birth certificate. She never cared to fix it. Grams said my mother was never right after my father got floated.”

Zip noticed Wells Jaha sitting there in the dirt with her, paying close attention to every word she said. Holy Shit. What was she telling him? Maybe she had hit her head. Maybe she was drunk on oxygen. She stared at him. His shoulders were so broad. His eyes were so gentle. 

“How did you get locked up?” he asked. Did Wells Jaha not know that it wasn’t polite to ask a girl what her crime was? 

She found herself telling him anyway. “My mother liked to drink. She was an asshole when she drank. After grams died, I ran away. Found a hole in the wall. A literal hole in the wall with a grate over it. I lived in there. I still went to classes, because I knew if I didn’t they’d catch me. And mom still collected my rations and drank them all. So I stole from the store room whenever I was hungry. They caught me. Mom was floated for neglect and stealing my rations. I was skyboxed for living in the wall and stealing from the store room. And here I am talking to you on Earth.”

And boy was she talking. She didn’t think she’d ever talked so much in her whole life. To Wells Jaha. THE Wells Jaha. She couldn’t stop the big smile from stretching across her face. What a weird feeling.

“Are you feeling better now?”

“I think so. I’m on Earth. It’s weird.”

“Yeah, it is. Would you like to help me take stock of the supplies we have here?”

“Ok.” Wells Jaha stood up and reached a hand down to help Zip stand. The moment she touched his hand, she thought she might be a little bit in love with him.


	2. Survivor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wells goes about burying the dead kids while the rest of the 100 are out playing. This time, he has a buddy to help him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read a Wells/Raven fic, and all of a sudden I was wondering how having Wells around might have changed Raven's experiences on the ground. And then all of a sudden, I thought I wanted to see Wells live and I could make that happen here. 
> 
> I believe Zip will make the difference. He's going to have a friend, from the beginning, instead of being an outcast. She's going to help him out. She's going to be the butterfly effect. Now I have to figure out how to do it.

Zip and Wells ignored the revelry. She almost felt guilty heading back into the drop ship, like she SHOULD be out there, running around on the green earth, because no one else in the universe but them could do it, but she followed Wells anyway. 

It didn’t hurt that he kept turning back to her, checking on her, seeing if she was okay. She thought he might still be worried about her concussion. The one she didn’t have. 

Wells sighed hard. As he looked down. She walked over to him. 

He was looking at the two bodies. The boys who had gotten banged around on landing. They were still where they had fallen. There was no medical crew to come take them. Not even a janitor on board. 

“I guess we’d better get to work.”

“What?”

“We can’t leave them here. They will rot. It will only get worse. We’ll dig a couple of holes in the woods and bury the bodies there.”

Zip looked at him like he was crazy. “That’s barbaric.”

“It’s not like we can give them a proper space burial,” he said. “That’s what they used to do on earth. They had whole fields of just dead bodies. They called them cemeteries.”

“I will never understand grounders,” Zip shook her head.

“Come on. Look. You see how these pipes have broken loose?” he reached up and unscrewed the pipe. “This is perfect.” She watched him again. This boy was tall and handsome, but he was so weird. He grabbed a piece of jagged metal and used it to loosen screws in the panelling of the wall. Then he attached the small piece of panelling to pipe. He held it up. “A shovel. This is what we’ll use to dig.” He stopped and then pulled off another panel and pipe, making a second shovel. Then he turned to Zip. “Help me carry them out.”

“I can’t touch a dead body.” Zip said.

He looked down at her with firm brown eyes. “Zip, we don’t have a choice. We were almost dead bodies ourselves. We will be dead bodies if we don’t get it together. We’re on this planet that is made of dead bodies and decomposed plants. It’s all dead. But if we want to live, we need to really live, and that means getting dirty and sore and doing the ugly things.”

Someone outside just happened to squeal and laugh. “They seem to be living,” Zip said.

“They aren’t living. They are playing. They are pretending that this all isn’t real.” He pointed at the body. “This is what’s real. And we’re the only ones to take care of it. Be brave. Grab on and help me carry.” Wells picked the boy up by his shoulders. 

Zip blinked at him and the way his arms stretched against his jacket. He was strong. Could she be strong?

She nodded to herself. She could be. This was real life. He’s right. Real life was ugly. She remembered living in her wall, the first few days, where she was nursing the bruises from her mom and getting hungrier and hungrier and knowing that she had to make a decision or she would die there. She decided to steal, but it was her decision, even if it eventually got her skyboxed, and she always felt good that she had done something on her own. She was a survivor and she survived her shit mom. She was going to survive this shit earth. Even if it was made of dead bodies and things and ick.

She pulled her sleeves over her hands so she wouldn’t have to touch it with her bare skin, and she went for his feet.

She dug with Wells Jaha and it hurt like hell. Her hands burned. Her shoulders ached and sweat was pouring down between her shoulder blades, but the earth smelled good under her hands and it was cool in the hole. When Wells bent down to the bodies and started stripping them, she gaped at him.

“What are you doing?” 

“We can’t bury the clothes. We’re going to need them. There’s no exchange on Earth where people can get new boots. We’ve got to salvage them and give them out when someone needs them.”

“Uh. No. I’m not stripping dead bodies. I’m not looking at naked dead bodies. No no no no.” She was actually freaked out. It embarrassed her that she was, but she was drawing the line. She hadn’t even seen a live naked boy. There was no way she was looking at a dead one.

Wells stood back up and leaned on his shovel. A cool breeze blew through the trees, and Zip thought it was the best thing she had ever felt in her life. She breathed in the green air and pointed her nose into the sky. A smile broke on her face and she almost didn’t recognize the feeling.

Wells was smiling back at her.

“Sorry. I think if I weren’t so sweaty and achey and exhausted that breeze wouldn’t feel so good.”

“Don’t apologize. It does feel good. Why don’t you go have some fun with the other kids. You helped out a lot. I can finish up here.”

She opened her mouth to say she would help and then he started taking off the one body’s jacket and she started backing away, involuntarily.

“I’ll go back to the drop ship,” she said, and hid in the trees before she could even see that he had smiled and waved back at her. She just couldn’t. That was all. She was going to leave him to do the hard stuff, even though she felt like crap about it. But she had reached her limit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did anyone ever notice that the sexy blue shirt that Bellamy wears throughout season 1 and most of season 2 is actually one of the shirts that Wells salvaged from the boys who died in the drop ship? Not sure about the jacket, but definitely the shirt. He was wearing a holey gray tshirt before Wells came back with the pile of clothes, and then Bellamy, who is shirtless (hubba hubba) grabs the blue shirt from Wells' arms. We never see the gray shirt again.


	3. Play the Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zip has spent her whole life in the shadows, avoiding notice, watching the big players around her use people and take whatever they want as winnings. It's happening again on Earth, and Wells is just trying to do the right thing, the practical thing.
> 
> If she keeps silent, she knows that Wells is going to lose the game because he doesn't even know he's playing the game. 
> 
> When Wells saves her from Murphy, and is almost killed for it, Zip decides that she's going to stack the deck in his favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out that Zip grew up with Murphy because their moms were drinking buddies. That doesn't mean they are friends.

On the way back to the drop ship, she didn’t encounter one other person. She thought that maybe they had seen the digging and the bodies and wanted to be far away from that, incase they were asked to join in. Which she kind of understood, but also, kind of was pissed about. And then she found the apple tree. 

She laughed to herself while stuffing her jacket full of delicious, tart juicy apples. This was her reward for touching dead bodies. Once her jacket was full, she looked at all the rest of those apples. Just hanging there for the taking. Nothing at all like the Ark, where everything was accounted for and rationed. If someone wanted anything, they had to pay for it, with credits, rations, or well… whatever they had.

Apples were a great resource. She almost wanted to strip the tree bare, and hoard them, give them out for favors. She laughed again. She could be queen of the apples. 

Except she couldn’t carry more than were in her arms right now. In fact, the apples kept falling out of the jacket/pouch that she made. She needed a better pouch.

She walked back to the drop ship, spotting the parachute where it lay, just flopped onto the ground, snagged on trees and twigs, tattered. She bet that she could make a good pouch to carry apples with. The more apples she brought back the more favors she could get. But someone would probably find the apple tree, sooner rather than later, once they got over the whole icky, hard work, burial thing. The apples were just hanging there for the taking. And she was sure there would be other apple trees somewhere. Which meant, the more apples there were around, the less valuable they were for trade. There would be kids climbing all over the trees, picking apples.

That’s when she figured it out. Not apples. Packs. She could rig packs. There were all the harnesses back on the drop ship that could be used as straps. She’d make a bunch of packs and hand them out. And then she’d tell them where the apples were. And she wouldn’t ask for anything.

She felt weird.

That was not how the Ark worked. You always paid. But she remembered how she had to pay sometimes, and she didn’t want to do that anymore. She didn’t want anyone else to do it, either. 

She wouldn’t ask for anything, but good will. Cooperation. Helping out. Like she helped out Jaha with the grave digging. If a pack could have gotten a few more helpers, it wouldn’t have been such a hard job for just the two of them. If it’s one thing Zip knew how to do, it was to scavenge. 

She didn’t have a blade, but she had her shovel still. The edge of that was sharp enough to create a slit in the parachute. She ripped it from there and tore off a nice sheet of it, folding it up and tucking all her apples in it to carry back. 

The drop ship was cooler than it was outside. And darker. It took her a while for her eyes to adjust, but when she did, she recognized what a wreck it was. There were seats and belts and wiring hanging. A bunch of panels that looked like there might be something in there. She started going through the stuff, organizing and separating the materials into piles. There wasn’t much in the panels. Some maps, a few first aid supplies, a couple of thermal blankets and a tool kit. That was it. 

The drop ship itself was what they had to salvage. She started in on her bags. It took a little while to come up with a way to connect the parachute to the straps, and she had to file a metal shard into a sharp point in order to get the parachute fabric cut without wasting it, but she was pretty satisfied with the four bags she had to start with. It was a job well done. She decided she’d earned the right to take a break and have some apples.

She was reclining on a seat, eating an apple with her feet kicking up in the air, examining her home made knife with pleasure when the guilt hit. She’d left Wells with the task of filling in the graves. The hard work. He probably wasn’t done yet. She picked up her shovel again, kind of a handy thing, actually, and headed back out to meet up with Wells.

She was half way through the camp when she heard someone call her name. 

“Hey, Zip,” 

It was Murphy. He’d grown up a few halls down. Her mom and his mom used to drink together. It started out nice. Her grandma had been dead a couple of years, and her mom drank too much. When she started taking Zip over to the new widow’s quarters, comforting her, making dinner for her and Murphy, Zip thought her mom was getting better, becoming a real mom. But really, she just wanted to get in on the bereavement rations, and the fifth of moonshine that came with it. 

Before the month was out, her mom and murphy’s mom spent every night getting drunk and ranting about Jaha and their ungrateful kids. Murphy and Zip went from playing chess and cards together to glaring at each other from opposite sides of the room. She knew that his mom started to beat him, just like hers. They would stare at each other’s matching bruises while never saying a word. He could be a mean asshole. But she didn’t have very many friends down here. Murphy had a pack of cronies backing him up. It made her nervous.

“Hey, Murphy,” she said. 

Murphy strolled up to her with a grin on her face. That was not a good sign. “H-how’s your mom?”

“Dead. Finally drank herself to death on rotgut.”

“Oh, uh…I”m sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t. His mom was as awful as her mom, but it was still hard to lose your mom. He looked at her like she was bullshitting him. He looked at her like she knew him, knew him inside. And she did. “Mine was floated for— well— you know.”

Zip had gone into the skybox before Murphy did. He would have been around when she was floated and heard all the gossip. Of course for him, it would have been first hand knowledge, as a witness. “They deserved it,” he said. “It was justice.”

“Justice would have been if someone had stopped them, and made sure we were safe.” Zip said, and she didn’t know where that had come from. Maybe Wells was rubbing off on her. 

Murphy narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re doing pretty well for yourself here on earth,” he said. “Making friends with Jaha. What? Are you looking for favors?”

“No. He’s nice. I was just helping—“

“You want to help? You should be helping me.”

“I—“ he made her nervous. She remembered how he used to punch her when her mother couldn’t see, because he just needed to punch someone. It didn’t hurt when he was younger, but he got stronger, and after a while she started looking for places to hide from him, not just her mother. That was when she found her wall panel, that led her through the ducts to her wall hideout. In a way, he was how she was able to escape from her mom. “I can help you.” She said. She was ready to live, she reminded herself. To learn new things, to stand up for herself. “What do you need me to do.”

Murphy smiled at her and then pinned her arms behind her back. The shovel fell at her feet. “You think you can make friends with the Chancellor of Earth and that will mean I don’t know where you come from? It doesn’t work that way, Chancellor’s whore. Not here on earth.” He dragged her over to the fire. “It’s the law of the jungle here. The mightiest takes what he wants. And I want the Ark to think we are dying of radiation poisoning. You’re going to show them.”

Zip said nothing. There was nothing to say. She struggled against him but he was right. He was strong and she was weak and the strong were in charge. “A little bit of pain, before we crack your wristband and we’ll give the Ark a good show. What do you think Zip? You ready for a some pain? That old familiar friend? You ready to help me out?”

She said nothing. Murphy and Zip both knew the rules. Stay silent or it would just be worse. And she tried. But fire hurt!

She couldn’t help the scream that ripped from her throat. Murphy was pressing her head closer to the fire when Wells came into the clearing.

“Let her go!” he yelled and knocked Murphy off of her. She fell to the ground and scrambled to get to her feet, panting. 

Of course Wells tried to reason with Bellamy. “You can stop this,” he said.

Zip could have told him it wouldn’t work. Bellamy laughed. “Stop this? I’m just getting started.” 

Wells didn’t understand that there were no Alpha rules down here, no council. She’d known people like Bellamy, people who loved the power, who loved to control others and take what they wanted. If all they had to use were delinquent kids and fists, that’s what they’d use. Wells didn’t know how to get along with people like them. If Zip was braver, she’d get in there and pull Wells back, take him to the drop ship and show him the apples and the carry packs she’d made. But she didn’t want Murphy to turn his attention back to her. 

And then Murphy sucker punched Wells. He pinned him to the ground and started punching. It was almost worse to see Murphy beating on the kind and gentle Wells than it was to be held above the fire. 

But Wells didn’t just take the beating, the way Zip would have, cowering. He flipped Murphy and held him down, punching him and knocking his head into the ground. Zip gaped. 

Wells was strong, she’d seen him digging, but there was no way he’d ever had to fight for anything, not like the rest of the delinquents had. He needed to use his strength now to show Murphy once and for all that he was not weak. That Murphy couldn’t beat him. That was what Murphy understood. Power. 

But instead of teaching him what he needed to know, Wells hit him once more and stepped back, turning to to Bellamy, “Don’t you see you can’t control this?” 

Diplomacy again. She knew what would happen before Murphy got up and pulled a knife. She was not the only one who had figured out how to make a knife. But she’d made a tool, and Murphy had made a weapon. 

“Wells!” Zip warned. He turned, facing Murphy, ready to fight him barehanded, weaponless. Zip’s heart beat a tattoo on her chest. This was worse than the Ark. On the Ark, they knew they had to hide their rule breaking or get floated. Here, no one would stop Murphy or anyone else from doing whatever the hell they wanted.

Then Bellamy stepped in between the two. He tossed his own makeshift knife between them. Had all the delinquents make weapons as soon as they hit the ground? Wells had made a shovel. 

“Fair fight,” Bellamy said, and moved out of the way, to let them get at it. She looked between them. Murphy, grinning. The bastard. He looked like he almost wanted Wells to kill him. Wells, grim and determined, and Bellamy… Bellamy looked… not as excited for a fight as all the other delinquents yelling, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Wells and Murphy faced off. Wells jabbed at him, nowhere near Murphy, as if he didn’t really want to do this. And Murphy spun right behind him and sliced his arm. Zip’s heart sunk in her chest. “Stop being nice,” she wanted to tell him. 

And that’s when Wells stopped being nice. Without even a struggle, he grabbed Murphy and pinned his arms behind him, the same way Murphy had held her, and then he put Bellamy’s knife to his neck. 

“Don’t be nice,” Zip said in her head, only in her head. She still couldn’t speak out, step up, be noticed. 

They stood. Wells, Murphy, Bellamy, Zip and the rest of the delinquents. 

Two things amazed Zip. Not that Murphy attacked, not at all, but that Bellamy stopped it and made it a fair fight, even though he hated Wells. 

Those were not the rules she knew from the Ark. Not for people like her and Murphy and Bellamy and most of the rest of the delinquents. It was always “whatever you could get away with.” “Whoever was sneakiest.” “Look out for yourself first.” Fair never mattered at all. She looked at Bellamy in wonder before turning to Wells. Nice was what got you chewed up and spit out.

Wells was too nice, but he was strong. He could fight. That was the other thing that amazed her. She never expected the Prince of the Ark, the Chancellor of Earth to be strong. How could someone so nice and responsible be so… powerful. 

Wells was tough and Bellamy was fair. This was important.

With Wells’ strength, he could make the rules, here. He had to stop being so nice, and show how tough he was. And if he could play his cards right, Zip bet that they could get Bellamy on their side and maybe they wouldn’t have to be at the mercy of people like Murphy. If only he knew how to play cards.

She knew how to play cards. She’d spent her whole life standing back, watching people use other people. She was playing too, but her game was about not being noticed by the big players, but she had to know who they were and how they worked in order to do that. Right now, the big players on the board were Wells, Bellamy and Murphy, and Wells had Murphy with a knife to his neck. This could be the move that would put him on top.

And then the game changed.

“Wells! Let him go!”

The Princess came out of the woods and all of a sudden, Wells just stopped. 

He HAD Murphy, and he just stopped. Stepped back. Let Clarke take over. It made her mad. 

She took her saggy hat off her head and threw it onto the ground, stalking over to Clarke.

“He was defending me!” Zip said, right up in Clarke’s face. “Murphy was going to burn me and take off my wrist band so the Ark would think I was dead of radiation.”

Clarke’s eyes focused on Zip. Zip blinked to be seen by someone like her. It was like being in the sun. Clarke brought Zip’s hand up to examine her wrist. It was red. Suddenly she realized it hurt. 

“Not too bad. We’ll take care of it,” she said, and smiled at Zip. Then she whirled on Bellamy. “You let that happen.”

Bellamy took a step back and shook his head as if wanting to deny it. But he had. Zip knew it, and he knew it. Was he going to let this keep happening, where the strong took what they wanted from the weak? It was time for Bellamy to decide.

Then another wild card came out of the woods. “Octavia!” 

The sister. 

Bellamy cared about her. She was the key to Bellamy, the way Clarke was the key to Wells. 

She listened to the news of the Grounders, and the missing boy, the mission that Clarke was planning. She knew that Wells would want to go with them.

But Zip hung back. Zip started thinking. Maybe she was a nobody, but nobody else seemed to realize this was a game, and she had a hand to play.


	4. Lucky Ace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one likes Wells on the Earth. And Wells doesn't understand how things work with the delinquents. Luckily, he now has Zip, and she is going to be the best friend he ever had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I already had this chapter almost all written in my files, so I finished it up and decided to post it. This was one of my first fan fiction stories, and there's no shipping involved. I guess it's a character study, and an experiment in cause and effect.

Zip grabbed Wells before he could run off looking for the missing boy with Clarke.

“Did you make these?” he asked her, when she showed him the packs she’s made out of parachute and harnesses and wire. He looked impressed. She was surprised how happy that made her feel.

She nodded, hardly able to look at him. “Brilliant, Zip. That is exactly what we need.”

“Yeah, I— found some apples and realized I would need a pack to carry them.”

“Even better. When I come back, you and I will collect apples for the camp. But in the mean time, I need to get some of that parachute so we can carry Jasper back when we find him. Show me where you got this from.

“Okay,” she said. She walked him over to the corner. Some of the other kids had already begun to salvage it. She got ready to slice off a bit with her knife when she stopped. She turned around to face Wells. She held her knife up in the air, like a warning. “You need to make friends.”

He snorted, looked annoyed. “I have you.” 

She ignored the flush of pleasure at his words. “I don’t have friends.”

“You have me.” There was no way to ignore the heat in her cheeks after he said that. She dropped her head to hide her blush and dropped her knife too. She shook her head and sighed.

“Neither of us have friends. We’re vulnerable out here. We need to make allies.” She looked up again at her and he was squinting at her.

“That’s not likely. They all hate me because of my father.”

“Whatever. You’re not your father. You’ve got something that they want. Show them.”

“I don’t have anything anyone wants,” he said bitterly. She was knew bitterness. She’d been bitterly disappointed her whole life. But screw that. She’d made it down to earth, and none of them up on the Ark had. 

“You’re here. You know how all this works. You’re the only one who thought about those dead kids and burying them and salvaging their clothes.”

“Lot of good that did. They just took the clothes anyway. I wanted to hold onto them until someone needed them.”

“They TOOK them?”

He snorted again. “Didn’t you notice Bellamy’s fancy new, non guard shirt?”

“Bellamy took them?”

“He took the shirt. The other kids took the rest.”

“Why did you let them take them?”

“What was I going to do? Fight them over it? What’s the point? We should have held them in reserve for when someone in the groups needed them, but no one wanted to do that.”

“Wells, you’re bigger than Bellamy.” She could not believe she had to tell him this. Had he spent his whole life just expecting people to follow the rules? Did no one ever lie to him? Or sneak around when the guards weren’t watching?

Wells shook his head. “I don’t know how they did things on your station but that’s not—“

“We’re not on Alpha. I saw you fight. You can fight.”

“Of course. We all took self defense on the Ark.”

“You are so stupid!”

“Yeah. You’re really good at being a friend Zip.”

Zip stepped up real close to Wells and pointed her knife at him. “I’m going to be the best friend you’ve ever had in your life.”

He eyed the knife that she waved around in front of him. “That’s looking doubtful. Do you want me to fight you now?”

“Ugh.” She threw her hands up in the air. “You should! Listen to me, Wells. You have really good ideas. You know how this all needs to look for us to survive, and you seem to be the only one bothering with surviving, but you are not going to survive if you don’t start getting some of those people on your side. Or at least getting them to respect you.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” he said. And she was kind of thrown by the look of vulnerability in his face. 

“You’re actually a nice guy. If they give you a chance, they might like you.”

“I don’t think they’re going to give me a chance.”

She nodded, remembering how Bellamy had talked to him, how that set everyone else up to talk to him the same way. And Clarke wasn’t helping matters either. “Here’s what you do,” she told him. “You work on your end, making friends with Clarke and Bellamy and—“

“And Murphy?”

“Hell no. Not Murphy. He won’t respect you like that. I know him. Next time he even looks at you the wrong way, you have to crush him into the dirt.”

“What? No!”

“It’s what he respects. Power. That’s why he likes Bellamy. You need to show him you’re powerful too.”

“You want me to be like Bellamy? I’m not going to do that. He’s a power hungry ass.”

“You should be too.”

“No Zip. I’m not going to do that.”

“Listen. If you want things to go the right way, you have to have the power to direct it. I don’t think Bellamy is that bad a guy. He gave you a fair fight. If he were like some of the people I’ve seen up on Factory, he wouldn’t have done that at all. He would have let Murphy stab you in the gut. You should try to make friends with him.”

“Murphy wasn’t going to stab me in the gut. I could have gotten it away from him. Probably.” 

“You probably could have, and, you know what? You should have. You should never have left him with that knife. He might still use it because he doesn’t know you can beat him, because you kept pulling back.”

“So wait, you want me to destroy Murphy and make friends with Bellamy.”

“That’s a good plan. People will stop messing with you and no one will ever take anything from you again. Get the big guy on your side. Teach the yapping prick a lesson. And find yourself some little guys so you can start working on getting this camp into shape.”

“I have no idea how I’m supposed to do any of that. I mean aside from beating up Murphy, apparently.”

“Bring Bellamy with you and Clarke when you go looking for the kid with the goggles.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” he said, but he was looking at her, really looking at her, as if she was worth something. She cleared her throat and moved on with the rest of her plan.

“While you’re gone, I’m going to grab a couple of the little ones, give them packs, show them the apple tree. Maybe I’ll figure out how to make a tent or something, bring some kids in. Protect them…” she was imagining what she would have wanted when she was a little. Someone to just pay attention to her, toss her a protein bar now and again. Notice when her mom hit her or let her go hungry. For the first time, she realized she was no longer that little. She was big. One of the oldest there, probably. She’d only been a couple of weeks from her majority when they sent her down here. Sure, she was a nobody, but to a little, she could be a somebody.

“That’s actually a good idea, Zip. With people like Murphy out there, those little ones are probably going to need someone to protect them.”

She looked at him. He was thinking about protecting kids he didn’t even know. She was thinking about how to gain power so she wouldn’t be at anyone’s mercy, so Wells could lead. 

She felt a shiver go down her spine. It wasn’t that cool in the drop ship. It was the thought that his kindness might be able to get him the winning hand, if he could learn to understand a little better how the game was played. And maybe she could be his lucky ace.

In the end, Bellamy did go with Wells on his mission, but it was the Princess who made the decision. Maybe, thought Zip, the Princess knew a little bit about how the game was played. She wasn’t sure how that would work for Wells, considering she seemed to hate him, but maybe there was time to figure it out.

After Wells and the Princess and Bellamy and, for gods sake Murphy left to find the goggle kid, Zip turned around to look at the delinquents just left, standing around, wondering what to do with themselves. She grabbed the smallest one.

“Hey, kid,” she said. “What’s your name?”

She still wore a long single braid like a little kid, and wrinkled her eyebrows suspiciously. Yeah, she knew how the game was played. “What’s it to you?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Yeah right. Do I look stupid? What do you want to show me?”

“That’s fair. That’s fair. You don’t trust me. Go grab a couple of friends, and I’ll show you an apple tree. Apples so juicy you’ll think you died and went to heaven.”

“Why would you show me that?” the kid asked, “What do you want?”

Zip sighed. She expected nothing less. This was how the Ark worked. But this wasn’t the Ark. This was the Earth, and it things were different down here. “Honestly, I just want to not die. I want some friends.” She surprised herself with the truth. “My name is Zip.”

The girl stood back on her heels and looked at Zip. “I’d like some apples. And I could probably use a friend,” she said. She nodded, and screwed up her mouth. “I’m Charlotte.”

“Cool,” Zip said. Feeling weird. Making friends. “Let’s go get some apples.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm un killing Wells.


End file.
